Frigophobia
by TheWildHeffernan
Summary: (Fear of Cold). Javert has a chat with himself. Sort of a rambling character study. T just in case.


_ I am no longer shaking. That stage is passed; I am only breathing the feathery breaths of a child, thinking as a child does that to be smaller means invisibility. To be larger, of course means power. I do not think in terms this clear, but it is the direction. I wonder, also where my mother has got to. Do I care? She is gone, certainly. Gone how?_

_ Well, what do children mean when they say gone?_

_ It varies._

_ What do adults mean when they say gone?_

_ Dead._

_ Her Romany whisperings in my ear have been silenced; her lighthearted vulgarity as she bats her eyes at each man, as she pulls up her tattered skirts to service them for money, occasionally, but more often for food. That, she shares with me, as is her duty as mammal, to feed her child. Drink, which she shares with me for the amusement of watching me try to stand. For a blanket, for a trinket, for a secret to keep. Or not to. _

_ She was gone with a scream. Or was it a whisper? Or a choking cough, splattering dark to the stone. I don't remember, though any of these is plausible enough. Perhaps there is a more likely choice; gone with a whirl of skirt and a dark chuckle, her hard gray eyes off-setting in her dark face, her black tangles forming a devil's halo as she walks away._

_ Mostly, her warmth is gone, completely. I crack my eyes open to see my hands and feet wrapped clumsily in rags, my knees drawn under my smock to my chin. My lips are blue, and my bones have cooled to the ice of the stone I press myself against. The corner is solid and straight, square as can be. Often I find this comforting; today it is cold. Stone buildings are always cold, no matter the season or the quality of the stoves. It is January. There is snow outside. Prisons are the coldest buildings ever built._

_Inside, the finicky stove is for the guards, and it is at the end of the hallway. It is cold as anything has ever been, no, colder. It is coldest, and I will not go towards the other corner, where the monsters and the giants huddle to stay warm. The men in red are faceless. They come in varying degrees of muscle and grime, but little distinguishes them from each other. They will live. They are used to cold like this, they've been made to be, and they lack the pride not to smash each other together to try and steal the ration of heat from one another._

_ I am too young and too small. Frost has crept up my arms and legs. The dark of my hair has been covered in white particles of ice. Everything is white. My eyes freeze shut, but I can still see. I can see the guard outside the gate, back to us, ignoring the little boy freezing to death on the stone. I find that with some effort, I can speak._

_ "Monsieur? Help me. Please." My voice is weak and trembling, but the place is silent. He can hear._

_ He turns, and his face is not that of a guard. It is a convict, streaked with dirt. He should be in here, on the other side, cowering in the dirty, marginal warmth of that mess. I know his face. It is the exception, the variant, the one outside the bars that doesn't make sense. He is wrong. So, so wrong, in every way I can imagine, and all at once, the temperature drops even more, further then I would have assumed possible. The world has stopped its movement, and begins to crumble in this heresy. I am a child. And if I weren't there would still be nothing I could do._

_ My chest splinters in the cold, my limbs shattering into slivers of ice. I scream, but the frozen air swallows the words, whatever they might have been. Everything is breaking._

_ My left hand has been sore, but all of a sudden it explodes in an extreme, alarming in that moment where you cannot ascertain which way the thermometer is pointing-_

_ It is burning-_

Javert jerked into a sitting position with a sharp hiss, clutching one hand in the other. He overbalanced in his surprise, and ended up in an undignified heap on his back by the side of the bed, scrambling to his feet with surprising swiftness for a man of forty-eight, gasping silently in pain. His mind was blank and shocked, as he tripped in the flickering darkness over something that may have been his boot. He found the edge of the little table with his functioning hand and searched out the water jug, plunging his hand inside without a moment's hesitation, cutting off the pain at its crescendo. He stood there for a second as the sensation faded from shock to a cold soreness, and shivered as a draft made its way in through the cracks in the old walls of the building and curled down his spine.

"Well, that's just rude, isn't it," Javert said quietly, either to the room or to the jug, which seemed to have trapped his now pulsing and freezing hand. He pulled at it a few more times, before shuddering and rushing, with more precision, this time, back to a perch on his bed, snatching up his scarf and his hat from where they'd fallen. Fallen? Been thrown, more like. Javert decided that he ought to place his things in a row where they could be reached quickly when needed, not strewn about the place as if they'd blown there by mistake.

Blown, like the wind through the cracks in the windows and walls of this god- forsaken building. It was bloody freezing in here. Paris is a drafty city, at least this particular corner of it, it seemed to him. In Montreuil-sur-Mer, well, his boss was a criminal, but at least the dormitory he'd slept in had been well constructed and almost new, with a very handy stove.

Javert smiled at his little joke as he wrapped the scarf his neck and shoulders, jamming his hat down over his hair. I had come undone, and it was wild and thick and rather impeding, but he didn't think he could manage getting it up again with only one hand. His bed was pressed up against the fire, and he scooted to the edge, close enough for the flame to occasionally lick the bits of his coat that hung over.

He gazed ruefully at the hem, scorched from previous close encounters, before hunching over, burying his chin in his collar.

"It's time to take stock, Javert," he mumbled, his voice low and wry. He addressed himself by his surname, which is decidedly strange, but it was all he ever heard, and all he ever needed. He had a name on paper, but he had never had one in his real life. He could vaguely remember a time when he had been Petit Javert, as there was a larger Javert around somewhere, but that was dropped when the distinction was no longer needed, and hadn't changed since.

"Why must you be so close to the fire, or stove, or what have you?" He paused, as if waiting for a response. "That's right. It's warm. Why do you need to be warm?" There was another pause. "Because you don't want to be cold. But you burn your clothes. You burn yourself, and it hurts like hell, so why? I know why, I know. It is dangerous, but not so much as being cold. Cold can kill, though heat can burn. Are you afraid of the cold, _gitan_?" he asked himself.

He was not of a disposition to lie, least of all to himself. Wouldn't that be fifteen times the horror of lying to another? If order can't be kept in one's own head, then there was no hope for the rest of the world, logically. Javert had realized long ago that his mind was not in fact, an orderly place. Or, if it was, it was organized too tightly, with no room to move about. He didn't suppose this was a bad thing. It left no room for kindness, which tore up society, or for mercy, which vandalized its laws. He, if he had been a deeper thinker, may have realized the paradox of these two philosophies, and the state of order in the world by extension, but he didn't often consider that deeply, and it often turned out badly when he did.

"Yes," Javert answered himself, with a minute's worth of hesitation. "Yes, I am afraid of cold." He frowned.

"That's ridiculous," he said at last. "Why not be afraid of criminals, or of wolves, or of being beaten to death? I know people who are afraid of thunder. At least that would be reasonably normal, however irrational it seems." There was a part of him, obviously, that was afraid of criminals, but they were only a threat to him in a dark alley at night, or in a prison cell. He shivered without knowing why. He must have dreamed of prison cells, for he still felt like he was inside one, and that the stone was leeching the warmth from the marrow of his bones.

That one convict had been there. The one from M-sur-M… Valjean. Jean Valjean, but back in his incarcerated days, mad as an animal and smeared with filth. Javert hadn't thought about him in ages. He didn't like to think about him. He had fooled Javert, years later, and as he thought about it, however briefly, he could feel the shame bubbling in the back of his throat. He had captured him again, almost a year later. Or nearly. But that time did not bear thinking about. It ate a hole in him somewhere inside, and it killed. The search had gone for a month, and at the end of that, everyone knew Javert was a fool. Like some sort of lazy cat that played too long with its prey. More like a madman, chasing a delusion and dragging along anyone who he could make to follow. He had drunk that night, alone, something he'd never really done, and would never do again. The absinthe had burned his mouth, but it had numbed the rest of it. He was ashamed enough in the morning to have shot himself had a gun been on hand, but he had settled for returning to work and replying sarcastically to any comment or sideways glance he earned. He watched his sense of humor fly over the heads of the rest of the police force, but more importantly, he watched the incident dissolve into the past and dissipate into the Paris smog.

But he'd still rather not think of it.

"But you are now, aren't you?" Javert said to himself. "Maybe that's what you're afraid of. Failure. Yes. You are afraid of failure, disorder, and cold. What a list." He carefully eased his hand around in the jug, and it eventually popped off, revealing his red and blistering hand. He tore a thin strip of fabric from the edge of a sheet, and wrapped it tight around his wounded appendage. He slipped his glove over it, putting the other on for symmetry.

The fingers were cut off to allow for better movement, which garnered the occasional second glance, but it more important to do his duty than to look the part, and he had given up on that long ago, letting his hair grow as it liked to compliment his tea colored skin and gypsy eyes, shaped just a hair towards almond and almost silver. Someone had told them they glowed in the dark; he doubted this, but he had once put belladonna in them to look a bit less suspicious on a case, and it had seemed to work. He found that as his hair neared gray, they stood out less and less. He was grateful.

He pulled his battered watch out of his pocket and read the time by the flickering of the dying fire. 2:01. He should be getting back to sleep. He was not a child who had had a bad dream, and had to be comforted. He was… well, he was a grown man who had had a bad dream.

"That's true, old whiskers, you silly thing. You are a man, of middling years with ridiculous dreams and strange fears, in a state of some disarray."

He laughed his peculiar, silently hysterical laugh, and placed the jug beside the bed. Pulling the quilt over his head and ignoring his throbbing hand, he curled up towards the fire, taking care not to let his arms hang over the edge.

He was still cold, he was still cold, he was always cold, but it wasn't so bad now. In the morning, Inspector Javert would be back on the streets of Paris, for his duty was all he knew how to do. And if he was cold, then who would know the difference?


End file.
